The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(3)
The roads were wide and there was hardly any other traffic, and he found Fosse House without much difficulty. The sun was setting with a Turneresque rowdiness of oriflammes across the horizon, but the storm was still grumbling menacingly over the North Sea and the wind was dashing itself against the car’s sides. Michael began to wish he was back in Oxford.
But here, at last, was the gateway to the house – tall, once-white posts with a somewhat insecure wrought-iron gate. Beyond them was a fairly long drive, fringed with thick shrubbery and elderly trees. Driving cautiously and slowly, Michael could not see the house, but he could see lights shining beyond the trees – erratic glimmerings, like the mischievous beckoning of will o’ the wisp marsh people … Or was it the corpse candles of a ghostly funeral, because if ever there was a gothic setting …?
He could not see the house, though. Was it shrouded in mystical mist, and only permitted to make itself visible once every hundred years? Did it rise up out of the Norfolk marshes on the occasion of some macabre anniversary, to lure unwary travellers?
It was neither of these things, of course. It was invisible from the first few yards of the drive simply because the trees obscured it. Michael rounded a slight curve in the drive and there it was, coming gradually into view through the trees as they dipped and moved in the storm-wind, as if tantalizingly and deliberately revealing a piece at a time. Fosse House, making a slow, dramatic entrance through the mists. The home of the enigmatic recluse Luisa Gilmore, whose ancestor had been part of a sacred choir that had sung to its own death throes.
It was not, of course, Roderick and Madeline Usher’s mansion of gloom, but Michael thought it was not far off. It was four-square as to construction and greystone as to fabric, and there were sprawling patches of discoloration on the walls as if some inner disease had seeped through. The windows were tall and narrow, each one surmounted with curved thick stone lintels like frowning eyebrows. It was the most unwelcoming house Michael had ever seen, and he was guiltily relieved to think he would not be staying in this faded grandeur overnight. Dim lights showed at a couple of the windows, although they were so dim that it was remarkable they had been visible from the drive.
As he went towards the main front door something moved on the rim of his vision. He half-turned and caught sight of a figure walking around the side of the house. Probably someone had heard his arrival and was coming to meet him. Michael waited, but the setting sun was directly in his eyes, and he thought after all there was no one there. Or perhaps it had been a bird flying across the light. He was about to walk on towards the house when the movement came again, and this time there was no doubt. Someone was coming through the shrubbery, and whoever it was moved quickly and lightly. The figure of what looked like a young man wearing a long overcoat. As if suddenly becoming aware of Michael’s presence, the boy stopped and looked directly at him. Michael received a brief impression of fair hair and pale features. At the same time a breath of wind stirred through the trees, and words reached him, fragmented as if broken up by the distance, but perfectly clear.
‘Mustn’t let them find me … You do understand that, don’t you …? For my sanity’s sake, I mustn’t be caught …’
The words made little sense, and the figure was already backing away. But a ray of the setting sun touched the face, and Michael saw that, as he had thought, it was a young man, barely more than twenty or so. He had deep-set eyes and a small scar on one side of his face. Or was it a leaf that had blown there and clung to the boy’s cheekbone?
The whisper came again. ‘You do understand …? It’s important that you do … I must get into the house, before they catch me …’
It seemed inconceivable that this totally strange young man could be addressing these words to Michael, but there was no one else about. Uneasily aware that this might be some local ruffian, fleeing from the police – he said, ‘It’s all right. I understand they mustn’t find you.’
The boy did not look like anyone’s idea of a ruffian. He put up a hand in what might be a gesture of acknowledgement, then turned and went back around the house’s side. Michael waited, but nothing else happened, and whoever the boy had been, and whatever his reasons for getting into the house were, it was nothing to do with Michael. He would mention it to Miss Gilmore, though, and there would probably be some perfectly innocent explanation. But by now he would have given a great deal to be able to get back into his car and drive as far away as possible from this house. It was not just that it was bleak and remote, or that elusive young men whispered sinisterly in its gardens; it was that he was finding it unpleasantly easy to visualize dark echoing rooms beyond those walls – rooms that might hide decaying memories or cobwebbed humans, or in which forgotten tragedies might still linger and sigh. Nell would look at him quizzically if he said that to her, and tell him the place was nothing more than a slightly run-down old house, and what did he expect in a house standing in the most waterlogged part of the country?
The thought of Nell’s sharp bright logic brought a semblance of reassuring reality back, and Michael stepped up to the massive old front door, and reached for the heavy door knocker. It fell against the thick oak and echoed sonorously inside the house. Michael waited and was just beginning to wonder if Fosse House was empty after all when there was the sound of footsteps from inside. They were slow, rather uneven footsteps, and he remembered that Luisa Gilmore was in her seventies.